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When Pot Meets Pop

Ever since various states have started legalizing medical marijuana, various products have popped up to meet that need. Canna Cola is one such product, although you won’t find Clay Butler using it himself. He doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t smoke. According to MercuryNews.com, Clay is a clean living guy.

Yet, Butler is a partner in a company that is poised to move aggressively in a market that could one day be enormously popular by combining pot with soda pop, two products widely seen as scourges by many Americans — though those upset by one tend to be approving or indifferent to the other.

What really intoxicates Butler is branding, the art of differentiating a product in the marketplace through words and images. And he’s designed a line of soda pop that he says will be branded to take advantage of an entirely new market. The line includes the flagship cola drink Canna Cola, the Dr Pepper-like Doc Weed, the lemon-lime Sour Diesel, the grape-flavored Grape Ape and the orange-flavored Orange Kush.

Marijuana sodas do exist in the marketplace. But, said Butler, none of them have the branding savvy of his product.

Butler’s epiphany was to market the THC-laced sodas “how Snapple or Coca-Cola or Minute Maid would make a marijuana beverage, if they ever chose to do it.” Thus, he used the marijuana leaf — it’s an unavoidable part of the “brand DNA” of marijuana products, he said — but he designed a leaf made of bubbles, to suggest soda pop.